This is the same left male hosility to feminism I’ve seen a hundred times.

What actual feminist theorists have you read? This might give a starting point to have this conversation. There are dozens of things calling themselves feminism out there, including the crap from Camille Paglia and her reactionary ilk.

I’m serious. What feminists are you referring to, speicifically and individually, and what did they say? This kind of artillery salvo does absolutely zero toward reaching any clarity or precision.

Your characterization with regard to “civil liberties’ is a grotesque straw (wo)man.

I will be posting the long piece in a couple of days.

I push at us because I think we are the next layer that has to be won over to the revolutionary ideas and practice of feminism-womanism.

I’d be a lot more sympathetic to this idea if it didn’t seem like most of the people who identify themselves as “radical” “feminists” have an unhealthy fascination with state power. Dworkin and MacKinnon, for example. The punch line always seems to be more laws, more cops, more gun control, more censorship, more taxation — in other words, the revolutionary agency which is going to liberate women from men turns out to be the existing capitalist state, and almost anything which further entrenches its control over the lives of ordinary people is thought to be A Good Thing. I don’t consider that to be a particularly revolutionary agenda.

Somebody will say here “not all feminists agree with those policies”. Perhaps not, but there is a remarkable lack of public criticism of these kinds of ideas from the womanists, as far as I can see. The only people who bother to oppose them are liberal feminists. If I have to choose between people who support the institutions of ruling class power, with civil liberties, and people who support the institutions of ruling class power, without civil liberties, I’ll go with the former, every time.

All of which is to say that I don’t enjoy being a slave for the corporations, and I don’t feel particularly sympathetic towards people who seem to want to be cheerleaders for the corporations’ enforcement and extortion agency, the capitalist state. I find it more than slightly odd that a body of theory and practice which started off thirty-five years ago, as “women’s liberation”, emphasizing the intimate connection between women’s oppression and class oppression, has mutated into “radical feminism”, which amnesties the state and the people who own it, so that it can blame the whole problem on individual men, who it considers to be an undifferentiated reactionary mass. It’s not particularly hard to figure out whose interests are served by that kind of theory. And it’s not unreasonable to assume that the gradual transformation of a promising social liberation movement into another ideological prop for the capitalist state, was something other than an accident. It’s almost like somebody planned it that way.

Much of the speculation about which came first – class or male supremacy – has been characterized by a paucity of archeological information (thanks to Peggy for filling some things in); but more importantly, the hoary left agenda to subordinate the question of gendered power within a class-first (primary contradiction) framework has been selective with facts to make them fit the agenda (and often just wrong). This raises my own index of suspicion that the male-led left is not as immune as it often pretends to plain dominant-class (seeiing gender as a class sytem) interest in preserving power. That gender is do deeply psychologically embedded only serves to make it more difficult to exhume the gender-ideology hiding inside constructions of secondary contradiction, “woman-questions”, and the embrace of liberalism on questions of gender while eschewing liberalism (in favor of revolutionary analysis and action) with regard to class.

Kovel’s aim, however imperfectly he might have pursued it with this excerpt, is to show the connections between gendered power, colonization, and ecocide – based on white male capitalist objectification as the rationale for domination… with gendered power serving as the epistemic base model. He and Peggy are both exquisitely sensitive (as they should be) to the operation of naturalization in this regard.

Since beginning my reading of feminist-womanist literature and theory in earnest three years ago, I have been drawn further and further toward the conclusion myself that gender preceded class, though I see them as absolutely inextricable and therefore without heirarchy in relaiton to “one another.” A quick look at the language used to describe relations between colonizer and colonized, between “Man” (of course) and “Nature”, and men and women, reveals a very consistent linguistic reflection of this.

I am working on a very comprehensive piece for posting soon that will attempt to observe this whole question from many angles – this time starting with semiotics, linguistics, and working out from there.

Many male leftists have been dismissive of these linguisitc questions, behaving as if prevailing attitudes of the past, providing the excuse for leftists of today to get off the hook. They will tell you about primary contradictions until they are blue in the face, while a woman somewhere is washing their dirty drawers or cleaning their hotel room.

I don’t mean to crack over-hard on male leftists, but they have the virtue, fro the most part, of having accepted self-criticism as part of their practice without becomng defensive. Those are props. I push at us because I think we are the next layer that has to be won over to the revolutionary ideas and practice of feminism-womanism.

When the human species first emerged, we were all foragers. Big game hunting came along much later, after we had developed the technology and kinds of social organization needed to capture and kill big fast animals. We were not naturally endowed with such capacities, as were wolves and large cats. We were omnivores, like bears, and our diet and means of subsistence were certainly more like those of bears than those of large hunting animals. Our protein supply would have come from insects and small animals like mice. We were the prey of the large carnivores for a long time before we were predators. We probably first developed means of defense against the predatory animals before, and on the way to, becoming predators ourselves. Thus there was a long period of time when males and females would have been on an equal footing wrt food-procuring techniques and abilities. Females were handicapped by childbearing and nursing, but they could forage as well as males, as they still do. There is no reason to suppose that during this long period of time a gendered division of labor, based on “hunting” versus “gathering”, was in operation.

AFTER the technology for big-game hunting was developed, THEN there MAY have come into being a gendered division of labor, based on the ability to engage in displays of virtuosity along the lines of running fast for long distances and throwing projectile weapons far and hard enough to bring down large and fast animals. Still, it seems to have been not so much a matter of subsistence labor as a matter of sport, displays of skill, as it is today. In those particular kinds of display, men seem to have always had the edge. But day-to-day food supplies would still have been obtained by foraging.

The domestication of animals and plants on a regular basis resulted in a profound transformation of human social organizations. This period is generally known as the Neolithic, it began about twelve thousand years ago, and is distinguished from the phase known as Paleolithic, when people lived by foraging, and domestication of plants and animals was uncommon, because it was unnecessary. Foraging provided enough for all. When this ceased to be the case in certain areas, then people took to growing their own food, so that they could have a larger supply of it. For a long period of time after the domestication of plants and animals, people lived peacefully in small settlements. Last time I read about the Neolithic, the small settlements showed no sign of needing defense from raiders. As soon as raiders appeared on the scene, settled people built defenses against them. Those settled people had weapons as well as the raiders. If Neolithic settlements were raided, which I do not know if they were or not, it would have been by desperate bands of outcast people. The loot would have been food, or stuff that could be traded for food or other useful valuables, like what thieves and robbers of today look for. But raiders were at a distinct disadvantage until the advent of horseback riding, about 4000 BC. By the time horseback riding and raiding became, for some people, a way of life, full blown civilizations with irrigation systems and walled cities and iron tools and the rest were already in existence. With a horse, you could get in and out fast, the horse was the first military vehicle, and it became the prototype of military vehicles thereafter.

So maybe we can blame it all on the horse.

The abduction of women and children by bands of male raiders, who wanted the labor of those women and children for the sake of their own subsistence, did not, to the best of my knowledge, happen until way later – i.e. in modern times in the Amazon. But that is a whole ‘nother story. If anyone has specific evidence of raiding and abduction of women and children as a phase in human prehistory, please bring it forward.

And if the raiders simply killed or drove off the men and abducted the women, are we to suppose that the men and women in the settlements were unable to defend themselves and their families against such onslaughts?

Kovel asserts: “This act [“killing or driving off the males from the atacked collective, denying the self-determination of the seized women and children, and the forcible sexual violation of the captives“] was a profound mutation in human being. It created a whole new conjuncture, which in time became a structure.“

Or in other words, Kovel is here asserting that bands of men raiding settlements in the above stated manner consituted an evolutionary, transformation of human society as a whole. In implying that this forcible violence against women was an evolutionary human development (virtually inevitable? Like capitalism?) Kovel really loses me, because this is all fantasy, with no material evidence to back it up, and much material evidence, as well as much logic, to contradict it.

I hope I need not go on. But reading that far in Kovel’s article, I got riled, and proceeded to write my original refutation, which alas for posterity has been forever lost in the bowels of the internet.

Oh, and about the French connection. I really love French social theoreticians – don’t know why, because many anglophone folks hate them, but there it is. One of the reasons I like French theoreticians is that they tend to go off on wild trips of speculative fantasy, and fact (“mere fact“ as one the them disdainfully called it) be damned. I love the world of “wild thought“ (pensee sauvage) and that’s why I love the French. But over the years, I have become an empiricist, renouncing the sins of my former idealism, although secretly in my heart I still savor the memory, and relish the contemplation, of such sins.

His claims about human prehistory do seem to be based on deductive reasoning, rather than hard (archaeological?) evidence, but does that render them completely without merit? If there is another explanation for how gender roles came to be solidified around the biological fact of physical gender, then perhaps it should be explained, or posted.

How about this: once class differentiation became a permanent feature of (some) human societies, the rulers quickly realized that an effective way to enhance their own wealth and power would be to increase the number of serfs and slaves under their domination by attacking and subjugating neighboring societies. This program would obviously have generated resistance from the targeted nations, both those which were also class-divided and those which were not.

Overcoming this resistance would have required large numbers of disposable soldiers — arrow-, spear-, and sword-fodder. In order to produce these troops in the required quantities, it would be necessary for the social managers to assert control over the means of (re)production — to convert women from citizens into baby-making machines, denied the right to control their own bodies and lives. This innovation would itself have required an appropriate ideology to normalize and justify it. And once this whole process was underway in one society, there would have been strong pressure to emulate it in all its neighbors, again in order to make possible the otherwise insane waste of human effort and emotion inherent in having babies, supporting and socializing them until maturity, and then sending them off to die to serve the interests of a tiny clique of nobles, warlords, and priests.

I think that there is rather more historical evidence to support this theory than the one advanced by the writer in question. For a discussion of this, I would suggest a book called “The Chalice and the Blade”, by Riane Eisler.

Joel Kovel is a colleague of Maria Mies, and her work argues vehemently against the naturalizaton of women. When JK is saying “Sex is of the earth,” that is not HIS position; he is engaging in a bit of literary ventriloquism.

Alas… the perils of excerpting.